Bordertown
Our goal is to serve as an instrument for relationship building and communication, and to encourage the conversation around resiliency, equity and justice. Our intention is to celebrate life and community - and to help create conditions for all life to thrive.
Bordertown
Episode 75 - Ginny Sassaman
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Ginny Sassaman is a co-founder, past president, and advisory board member of Gross National Happiness USA, and the creator of the Happiness Paradigm. Since 2013, she has served as a lay preacher at Unitarian Universalist churches in Vermont, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and South Carolina. Originally from central Pennsylvania, Ginny and her husband spent many years living in Washington, DC, before settling near Montpelier, Vermont in 2001.
Ginny has a master’s degree in Meditation and Applied Conflict Studies from the Woodbury Institute at Champlain College in Burlington VT, and a Certificate in Positive Psychology from Tal Ben-Sharar and the Wholebeing Institute. She has been the communications director for national non-profits (Common Cause and the Woman’s Legal Defense Fund), a full-time watercolor artist and a working mediator.
In 2009, Ginny joined with others in central Vermont to co-found Gross National Happiness USA, the first grassroots organization in the United States focused on building a movement for a thriving and sustainable future based on a holistic framework of defining individual and collective success. She served as President for a year and now serves on the GNHUSA advisory board. She is also on the advisory board of the Happiness Alliance, a Seattle-based group which collects and analyzes happiness data.
Ginny released her book, Preaching Happiness: Creating a Just and Joyful World in 2020. The book is a collection of secular sermons she has delivered in Unitarian Universalist churches and fellowships from 2013 through 2019. Each sermon explores the connection between spirituality, personal happiness, and with the urgent need for broad economic systems change. Ginny has also given speeches and presentations on individual and collective wellbeing in Seattle; Portland, OR, Santa Fe, NM; Burlington, VT; Charlotte, NC; New York City and Costa Rica.
To learn more about non-violent resistance and the work of Erica Chenoweth visit her Harvard website.
Music for this podcast – Adding My Voice by Railroad Earth
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